Magdalena O!

This weekend Toronto unwillingly hosted the G20. Although I have been physically in Amsterdam since Saturday, I have not left Toronto, glued to Twitter and the Internet reading obsessively about everything that is happening from all sides. Reasearching what the G20 actually does(n’t) do, and the history of it all, trying to figure out how easily meaningful discourse about the Summit gets obscured by hysteria from both sides. My write up on being a spectator from abroad is slowly coming to fruition. I need to take a few days to digest my interaction with the Summit almost exclusively online.

I am living with Rico, who runs IChione, and his family for the summer in their attic in Amstelveen. It is strange to have a peer that also has a 14 year old daughter. It is an interesting negotiation for me as a student but also an adult. At 23, Rico was on his way to be an ordained monk but then his daughter was conceived and he realized his way into it could not occur because he’d have to leave them both behind.

Here are some of what I saw yesterday in my new neighbourhood playing around with my UV lens. Flickr.

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MUSIC: Also, a few days ago one of my favorite music people in the world, Loops Haunt, posted a mix called Strange Fruit Vol 1. It has many wonderful old love songs on it. You should download it and have him be in your life too. OK? OH! And I just found out that he’s playing StekkerFest in Utrecht on August 14! I am there! Maybe this special person I know can come too? For his biiiiiirthday?

I AM SO BUSY! Who isn’t busy though right? Always “busy.” On Friday I am off to Amsterdam to study Digital Methods at the University of Amsterdam for two months. I have been packing my life up for the last few days because I am also moving out of my apartment. The Skylight House has kept me for over three years. That’s the longest I’ve lived anywhere since I moved out on my own ten years ago. Mostly, it’d be several months here and there. I am uneasy because as soon as I moved in here, I told myself I will stay here until something really large happens upon my life to totally change it. I don’t see it (now?) I’m putting all of my things in a warehouse for the summer until I return in September, when I will attempt to find a place to live as fast as possible. For now, I am taking much too long packing. It is so impossible to efficiently move when you get lost in recalling and remembering all the sentimental junk you’ve been keeping that must be read and looked over! Teenage love letters are a crucial interjection to the exhaustion of sifting papers.

70 days in Europe. Summer in Europe (again). IF everything works out, I’ll stay a bit longer to go to Sun & Bass. Maybe I can sneak my way in to VJ somehow. I want to befriend some VJ’s and people who play with video in Amsterdam! WHOA! I am actually wanting to make friends?! Are you a Dutch friend? I need to be shaken up so much. The stagnation of familiarity has put up too many walls too high. I might go take the train to see some people while I am there if I can find some extra monies.

Things I want to accomplish there (while studying and raving):

• learn Max/MSP
• my Thesis Project Proposal
• bike around the northern Holland coast
• read a book in French (even a short one)
• go stalking in Warsaw
• re-form the whole way I approach taking photos
• make contacts for a PhD
• make a short film

Everything is in flux at this moment. I wonder if I will be able to produce an original piece of new media work to complete my MA for Summer 2011? All I have so far is rumination all day and night. How long did it take you to be sure? How long can you contemplate and research before you must put something down? When do you know this is it? Do you just feel it? I am skeptical of the transformative deconstructive ‘magic moment,’ even though it has occurred in my life a few times. What am I really wanting to know? What do I want you to know? I don’t have the answer.

Katharine Tillman, a woman from New York that I have been obsessed with for many years has been posting so many fascinating article links on Twitter. One of them was from Slate about Elizabeth Loftus and memory. My selective memory is one the things I am so proud of yet comes out of having serious difficulty remembering anything that follows a linear logic (such as names, tasks, directions, etc… even causal relationships). I think that is why post-structuralist theory and philosophy make so much sense to me, at least one of the reasons – because I remember and then can synthesize and understand it. How can I train myself to recall things and ideas that follow a successive order … ? Do I need to? … or am I doomed from playing with mercury as a child?

I am so glad I am leaving in time for the G8/G20 Summit in Toronto. Our streets have been taken over by cops that aren’t just for show but actually stop people at their leisure if they’re engaging in potentially ‘dangerous’ activities such as taking photographs of buildings. The downtown core has been stripped of newspaper boxes, bike locks and even trees have been uprooted to prevent protestors from using the branches as weapons. There’s a giant fence that keeps reminding me of the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw. I don’t have much thoughts on it because I’ve been so enclosed in my life of studying and packing, but mainly because I am in shock at the whole situation and what this is doing to my city and to us, and how can we have protocols in place to prevent this from taking over a city again. The amount of money that is drained from US, from all of us taxpayers that had no choice but to accept the Summit here. How can it be that the money I am giving to my government can be used AGAINST me (I am thinking particularly of protestors, people that live in the core, etc.)? FUCK.

Ok, my next post will probably be from Europe — I am including a photo of Sara and I from Montréal when we presented at Congress 2010 on “Digital Storytelling Pedagogical Intervention” and a photo of my dear friend Meichen showing off her culinary loves. Meichen is doing a residency at Parsons Paris this summer and Sara is travelling to Vienna to take part in the Ultimate Frisbee World Championships.

Also, do you follow me on your RSS reader? Just make it happen.

OK BYE! Now I am baking organic spelt flour oatmeal raising walnut cookies for my class tomorrow. I hope there is enough. I mean, I hope I don’t eat them all first.

This is Not What I want to Be Doing.

I peek into the world of the Other. I have made considerable measures to open up the containers, both my own and the one of the Other. I am desperate for the Other to not only notice but want to open up my holes more, make consequences of the holes. It’s easy to peer through the holes, even touch the stuff inside, imagine how it could feel like belonging to me. I am always imagining the Other as more than I am. I am constantly in relation to the Other. I have created a self-appointed war in which I don’t know how to compete in at all and my enemy refuses to be the enemy. It’s effortless for me to start with, “I am not…” when asking myself what I am. The Other seems so assured and willing. I suffer from myopia.

This is Not What I want to Be Doing.

Being insecure paralyzes your body. The Other doesn’t ask for my reassurance but I give it, and with that, faulty expectations arise in me. I need to go inside myself first. Not to figure out what I want to do with my life as some sort of psychological cliched breakthrough, but if I am constantly teetering, I need to figure out how to go through and risk it.

I am not productive with my energy, AT ALL. Most of my days are spent imagining, procrastinating, aimlessly sitting around my apartment until a moment comes and it’s almost always at that time I have to go to class, or go to meeting or sleep. I can’t just wait around for moments of magic, disillusioned that the Other has somehow harnessed these magical moments into the makeup of their container. Struggle. Struggle.

Why am I always reaching out for the Other? What is the Other constitute of that I am lacking? My container is swollen and ruptured (maybe? or is the rupture not happened yet… at that moment will I have no choice but to take that unknown risk for the future?). Ok. Maybe the container doesn’t break all at once, but little scissions occur all around. Yes, there are many holes. I have made the holes in myself and the Other. When did I start doing this though? I don’t remember.

What do I want to be doing?

I am tired of the constant “I” and my struggle with solipsism yet inability to escape it.

i found this photo of me from 2004. i used to spend hours talking about ‘doing’ with j, the man that took this photo.

<< video taken down cos the creepy messages came in way too fast >>

Say something. Don’t be a passive reader yo! Is this video make you feel awkward? Do you want to tell me to shut up or do you want to make out with me till you can’t breathe? I am shouting to my imagined audience that WordPress Stats tracks. I don’t have facebook, so I just creep on my readers instead.

& I bought my ticket to Europe finally. Did you know with Air Canada at the check-in counter you can volunteer yourself to give up your seat and take a subsequent flight? So if the flight is overbooked (as they usually are, especially in the summer months) and you don’t get a seat, you receive a $500 voucher and hope they get you an another flight quickly. Although why you would be flying with the overpriced Air Canada is another issue. I had two $500 vouchers because they did that to us (we didn’t ask for it then! volcanic ash saved us!) and I still had to pay $430 in fees and taxes.

I’m going to attempt this volunteering maneuver at the end of the month when I fly to Brussels to connect to Amsterdam.